Shoe Mania, Part 4: They're Multiplying!

I was so pleased and excited by the results of my first pair of sandals that I immediately started on three more pairs. I had another design that I wanted to make for myself, and of course both of my daughters wanted some too.

Younger Daughter's Pair: Fancy Thong Sandals with Horse Head Conchos

My younger daughter flipped through the "Sandal Making" book and selected a thong style. Of course she wanted a small modification to the style to make it just what she wanted. She wanted a horse head decoration in the middle of the shoe. Tandy had some matched right- and left-facing horse head conchos that were just the thing.

I cut out the bottom soles and heels for her shoes. Her shoe size is about a kids' size 2, and it took about a square foot of saddle skirting leather.




It's easy to make a long oblong slot for a wide strap even if you don't have a big enough punch. Simply punch a second (or third) time, overlapping the ends of the hole, as in the following picture.


The colors and dyeing process were pretty similar to what I did with my first pair. With her pair, however, she wanted the sole to be black. No problem. After dyeing, I cleaned the pieces with Lexol and treated them with carnauba creme (wax). Since I was going to be gluing the straps to the soles, I didn't treat the whole pieces with the wax. I used the tape to show where I didn't need wax.


Fitting her shoes took repeated efforts, since I had to align the toe straps with the conchos and the riveting and make it fit around her foot properly. I did a fair amount of skiving on both the soles and the strap ends for her shoes so she wouldn't have huge lumps where the double layer of straps went under her (lack of) arch (I marked the skived areas with chalk in the picture below). I didn't bother with padding.


For my first pair I had used nails to reinforce the connections between the straps and the soles after I had glued them with Tandy's contact cement. For this new pair, I used rivets and cement. I also skived the straps, shaving off some of the blue and green dyed layers, so they wouldn't have such noticeable edges under the foot.


Next, I glued on the sole, avoiding putting cement on the back strap, which is supposed to slide.


For this pair of sandals, I wanted to try stitching around the edges of the sandals instead of nailing on the sole. The stitching gives a neater, more finished look to the sandals. The first step is to mark a dotted line of dents using an overstitcher that gives 5 stitches per inch.


I then used a Number 51 drill bit (just smaller than 1/16th of an inch) to drill holes through the soles. I was using a hand-held corded drill. It took 40 minutes for me to drill all around the two child-sized sandals, and my hands and arms were aching by the time I finished. Unfortunately, it was hard to drill straight down through the soles, so the bottom line of holes (and the resulting stitch line) wavered quite a bit. I drilled right through the heels as well.


We used two-needle stitching (my daughters both did some). I found helpful information on this on the web, particularly on the Back Room Leather website. I used waxed nylon sewing awl thread from Tandy. The stitching took about three hours.


We tried various methods to smooth the edges of the sole. Here my younger daughter is using sandpaper wrapped around a small block of wood to sand the edges of her sandals. She is using a "lacing pony" to hold the sandal while she works. The sandpaper-around-wood worked, but it was very slow, and it didn't work on parts that curved inward (the arch area). I also used coarse sandpaper cylinders attached to a mandrel on my drill. That worked better.


Once the stitching and trimming steps were done, I dyed the edges black to match the inner sole.

I don't want the shoes to be slippery, and I want to protect the stitching from wear, so I put a layer of SoleTech 3.5 on both the heels and the main part of the soles.

I had learned my lesson from the first pair of sandals, so I cut the SoleTech pieces a bit large and then trimmed them off after gluing the pieces to the sandals.


Here are the finished sandals:


Here is the front view:


I think the horse head conchos were an inspired piece of design on my daughter's part. She gets comments all the time about how cool they are. I hope she doesn't outgrow them in a month, but if she does, I can always make her another pair!

Polyester and Cotton

I recently got a question on my review of the Tulip tie-dye kit as to why everyone recommends 100% cotton items for tie-dyeing.

The reason for the 100% rule (down to 80% cotton usually works fine too) is that polyester fibers are, when you get right down to it, plastic. Think about the polyester fleece now made from recycled soda bottles (such as that in Patagonia products), and you have the idea. The Procion dyes used in the Tulip kits (as well as Dharma and Jaquard) wash right off of plastic (gloves, table covers, etc.). So that's what happens with your shirts. If you look closely at the cotton/poly, you should be able to see white fibers after washing the excess dye out. That's the polyester.

Here are some examples. The following picture shows a rag I use to clean up my dye spills (thus the mottled colors). It's a piece of thermal underwear that is a cotton/poly blend.


Here is a closeup of the same piece. The white threads are the polyester. The cotton has taken the dye.


It's almost impossible to find pure cotton socks, since synthetics such as polyester and nylon help the socks wear much better. Also, any elastic used in the socks will be non-cotton itself and probably covered in polyester or nylon. The trick is to find socks that hide the polyester or other synthetics as well as possible. Usually you will have to try dyeing a pair to see how they work, since it's impossible to tell the difference when the socks are still white.

This sock shows a lot of synthetic content in the foot, but less in the folded-down cuff. If you like the heathery mismatched look, it's fine.


This sock dyes quite well. The foot is only a little heathery, and the outside of the slouch cuff hardly shows white at all.


Here is the closeup. Note that the elastic around the cuff is fairly well hidden on the inside. You can see the white flecks in the foot area.


Here are two turtlenecks I dyed. The one on the left is 100% cotton, and the one on the right is 60%cotton/40%polyester. The turquoise and navy shades are supposed to be the same in both shirts.


You can't quite see the white threads here because they are so fine and well interspersed with the cotton, but it's definitely the polyester making this shirt so faded looking.


This is where the turtleneck attaches to the poly-blend shirt. The turtleneck is a somewhat different blend from the shirt body, and it contains 10% spandex. It is also a different weight and knit from the body. Note that the two different blues are the different fabrics' reaction to the same dye color. There is no way I could have intentionally dyed these different shades with such a clean line between them!


The following is the 100% cotton shirt. Note that in both this and the previous shirts, the stitching is pure white. It's polyester. For most shirts, nobody would notice, or if they did, they would think that it's intentional contrast stitching. However, this is why Dharma notes on almost all of their garment blanks whether they are stitched with polyester thread (they often say "Not cotton thread"). For some garments, visible white stitching would be an unwelcome surprise.


Dyeing Polyester

Dyeing polyester requires different types of colorants, since most fabric dyes just wash off the fiber. Dharma offers one type of dye for polyester but it requires hot water, and it usually needs to be simmered on the stove. Since I'm more of a natural fiber fan, and I'm too lazy to use anything other than the cold-water Procion dyes, I haven't tried it myself.

Respect the Blends

Keep in mind that you can get interesting effects using the cotton/poly blend fabrics, such as the patterned effect on the thermal underwear knit. I've seen tops in stores recently where the fabric is knit in stripes or patterns of cotton followed by polyester blend, providing a very cool arrangement of strong and pale colors. Also, if you like pale pastels, blended fabrics give you an easy way to do it.

Making Plans to Make Tracks

Faire warning: The Maker Faire is coming back to San Mateo, California, May 30 and 31 (the weekend after Memorial Day weekend).

I have written about the Maker Faire before. I practically start hopping up and down when I think about going to it. In fact, I was lying in bed thinking about it and decided I had to start writing about it again before I'd be able to get any sleep, so I got back out of bed.

The Maker Faire has a huge variety of displays, exhibits, demonstrations, activities, and shopping opportunities that appeal to a wide variety of tastes and interests. You'll see the quaint, the bizarre, the practical, the artistic, the robotic, the gothic, the stylish, the geeky, the eco-minded, the homey, the flaming (literally), the tiny, the giant, and the flat-out "huh?", all in one place.

Tips

Last year the faire was bursting at the seams of the San Mateo Expo Center. In the afternoon, the ticket and backpack search lines were really long. Get your tickets in advance from the website, and arrive early in the day.

Carpool! There is parking, but the extra parking is quite a hike away from the entrance.

Wear comfortable shoes. You will be doing a LOT of walking.

Take a water bottle. You'll need it.

Take empty shopping bags. There is a lot of very tempting stuff there.

Food is not the strong point of the Maker Faire. Eat well before you go.

Take a camera! The sights are amazing, and your friends back home won't believe you without pictures.

Study the Maker Faire schedule and map on the website. They have lots of special events, and different parts of the faire close at different times (as I found out the hard way last year).

Keep an open mind. You'll never know how much fun it is to ride a wooden bicycle until you try it!


See you there!

Visiting Michael at Island Sandals

When I was getting started on my sandalmaking project, I spent some time with Google searching on the Internet for shoemakers, shoemaking supplies, sandalmaking, and other similar queries (a close friend taught me a few years ago how useful Google can be, and now I'm addicted to it). I found lots of interesting results, such as a high fashion designer shoemaking school, YouTube videos on old-fashioned shoemaking, shoe repair suppliers, and so on.

Serendipitous Coincidence

One of the websites I found was for Island Sandals, located in Lahaina, Maui. It so happened that I was already planning a family Winter Break trip to Hawaii (the Big Island and Maui) to see the volcanoes there (inspired by a recent unit in my older daughter's middle school science class). I started an email correspondence with Michael the Sandalmaker, and made plans to visit him in his shop in Lahaina while I was on Maui.

Among other things, I carted all four pairs of sandals I had made so far to Lahaina with me (that was easy--the kids were wearing theirs!) to get Michael's opinions and advice on them.

I didn't take many pictures or any video while I was visiting Michael, since some previous visitors had already done an extensive set of videos of Michael discussing his sandals, their care and cleaning, and some of the reasons he makes them the way he does.

The Sandal Design

Michael bases his sandal design on an ancient Ethiopian design meant for running warriors. The classic design is elegant in its simplicity. It has two straps: one runs under the heel and comes up on both sides of the heel as the riser, and the other is a long thin strap that winds around the foot and through holes in the sole to form the main part of the sandal. This "harness" strap arrangement holds the sandal on the foot really well so that the relatively-thin sandal sole moves with the foot (as opposed to the motion of the sole of a flip-flop sandal). When I tried some on, I felt like I should be doing dance moves in them.


The blue in the picture is the foam Michael uses for padding. The old sandal on the right is one Michael shows customers of an example of a sandal that has been well cared for with Saddle Soap and has been worn pretty much constantly for 15 years or so.

The main strap is fastened with an ancient and very simple knot that gets tighter over time.

Here is the back of the knot:

Here is a slip-knot version of the knot, used for things that need to be released easily:


The only metal in the shoe is a trio of brass nails that reinforce the attachment of the rubber heel.

The Pattern

Michael showed me how he traces the feet, keeping the ballpoint pen straight up and down for an accurate pattern. Since most people's feet are not the same, he traces both feet. Here is Michael's example of a foot tracing.

The holes for the straps are located such that the straps never go directly underneath where the bones of the feet press on the sole. For example, in the picture above of Michael's old sandal, the heel riser strap goes across underneath the foot just in front of where the heel comes down on the sole, not directly underneath the heel. Also, the straps never press on the bones above the soles (you wouldn't want a strap pressing on a bunion), but rather they nestle into the hollows between them.

All the Cool Toys

One advantage Michael has (besides working in beautiful Lahaina) is that he has all the right tools. Over the years he has bought a shopful of shoemaking and shoe repair tools from various places, typically from shoe makers and repairers who were retiring. The technology for making custom shoes hasn't changed very much over the past 50 or more years, even though the technology for mass producing shoes (like athletic shoes, for example) has changed quite a bit.

One of Michael's main tools is known as a finisher, which is basically a long spinning pole with several different wheels spaced along it for grinding, sanding, and polishing, such as for grinding and sanding the edges of a new sole of a shoe (here is what a new one looks like--Michael's is a much older finisher, though probably not quite as old as this one from 1948). It's a standard machine for a shoe repair business. It's also quite dangerous (especially the older ones), since it's easy for straps and such to get caught in it. Michael told me he'd once gotten a finger caught, and the finisher had dislocated all of the finger joints. Ouch!

Michael also has a stitching machine that pokes a hole with an awl-like point and then pokes back through the hole with the thread-bearing needle. Also a dangerous machine (not for use by kids).

I'm not planning to get any of the shoemaking machinery Michael has--it simply won't fit in my garage (and we now have a rule that I can only bring in new stuff if I get rid of the equivalent amount of stuff!). I probably won't be starting a business or making enough shoes to justify big equipment anyhow. But it's great to see how the pros do it!

The Leather

Michael uses latigo leather exclusively. This is leather that has been dyed and heavily oiled at the tannery. It's perfect for sandals. Michael gets his leather from all over the world.

(Not) Sniffing Glue

One great piece of advice Michael gave me was to move away from using contact cement that contained MEK (methyl ethyl ketone), toluene, and other toxic chemicals. He suggested a different adhesive, 3M's FastBond 30, which is water based. It turns out to be fairly hard to find, but I was able to order a gallon of it online through thegluedepot.com.

I'm now using the Fastbond 30 for all of my shoemaking work. I really like it. It seems to hold just as well as the regular contact cement from Tandy, but it doesn't smell nearly as bad, and it doesn't need to carry a "could be fatal" warning on the label (a big plus, since I planned to use it with a bunch of middle school girls). I also find it easier to work with, since it's more like paint, and it doesn't get as stringy as regular contact cement. The downside is that you do have to wait a bit longer for the Fastbond 30 to dry before you can put the pieces together. A fan helps with the drying, though (and dissipates what smell there is).

A Fun Visit

Michael clearly enjoys his work and talking to his visitors, though a lot of his custom sandals are ordered by mail (especially for repeat customers). His sandals are really beautiful.

I had a great time visiting Michael in Lahaina, and I learned a lot. Thanks, Michael!

Shoe Mania, Part 3: Sandal Pieces, Unite!

Now that I had dyed and put together the uppers for my sandals, I wanted to add some padding between the soles before I put the soles together. I got some foam rubber meant for insoles that had a tan knit fabric covering on one side (Ortho Sponge Top-Cover ordered from Louis Birns & Sons). I'll get it without the fabric for next time, but this will be fine for now.

I cut out 3/4-length pieces for each foot, plus extra pieces for a second layer at the heel.


First, I glued the heel layer to the sole layer of padding. I also marked where the sandal straps will go relative to the padding.


Since the straps are all supposed to be adjustable, they need to be able to slide across the sole, so I was careful to avoid putting any contact cement where the straps will be. I'm now ready to glue the padding to the upper sole. Note that the extra layer of padding at the heel will butt right up against the strap there.



The fabric side of the foam rubber did not glue well, so it required multiple coats of the contact cement before gluing to the other piece.

Also, once I had it glued together, there wasn't enough leather to form a good bond around the padding. I pulled it back apart, trimmed the padding to be narrower, and glued it back together.


Nailing the Soles

Since I had this romantic vision of shoemakers nailing shoes together, I wanted to try that myself. Finding the right type of nails turned out to be problematic, though, since normal people don't use shoemaker's nails. There are also quite a few different types of shoemaker's nails. The instructions I was following in the "Sandal Making" book just said "Sole Nails", which turns out to be not quite the right terminology.

I ended up getting "wire clinch nails" from Louis Birns. And of course, I needed to learn yet another measurement convention. It seems that for wire clinch nails, the sizes are noted as 4/8, 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, and 8/8, where 8/8 is a nail an inch long, and 4/8 is half an inch. The trick, though, is that the tip of the nail is meant to bend over when it strikes the anvil, thus locking the nail into the leather sole. So an 8/8 nail is meant to secure a sole that is just less than an inch thick.

I used 5/8 for the main sole and 7/8 for the heel. Here you can see that the nails on the sole poke through quite a bit and bend way over--they are too long for this thickness of sole. These nails would really mess up a nice hardwood floor.

If you look closely you can see the U shape of the nails poking out from the soles--not the desired effect.

Non-slip Soling

I got a sheet of SoleTech 3.5 soling material from Louis Birns. This is pretty thin rubbery material with a slight texture to make the soles less slippery.

Here are the SoleTech pieces I cut. I don't plan to have the rubber come up over the point of the shoes, so it is cut short at the toes.


I glued on the SoleTech with more contact cement. I also dyed the edges of the sandals blue and treated them with Lexol and carnauba creme as I did with the upper soles and straps.

Here are the finished sandals. Yay! I've finished my first pair!


Thoughts for Next Time

Nails: The 7/8 wire clinch nails I used around the heels worked fine, but the 5/8 nails I used for the much thinner sole section were too long. This caused them to form raised "U" shapes on the surface of the sole when they bent over, instead of having just the tip bending flat back into the sole.

Bottom sole surfacing: I had some trouble with having the SoleTech sheet peeling off the sandals, particularly where the nails stuck up from the leather sole, causing about a square centimeter of the SoleTech to not adhere well to the leather sole with the contact cement. I had to redo the sole piece for one sandal, partly because I had cut it a little small, and a couple of nails stuck out right at the edge, aggravating the peeling problem. The second time I cut the SoleTech piece a little larger than the sole, and I trimmed off the excess with a knife after gluing. That worked much better. I think trimming the rubber to the sole also helps avoid creating a place where the rubber can catch on something and be pulled off. Later, though, I plan to try some different soling materials. This SoleTech 3.5 is really too thin and fragile for the sandals I'm making, and it's wearing through much too quickly.

Cement: It also seemed that the contact cement wasn't strong enough (except for its smell!) for gluing the rubber to the leather, though it was fine for the leather-to-leather bond. One of the guys at the leather store suggested using multiple coats of the cement on each side before putting them together. I tried multiple coats later, and it helped (though at that later point I was also using the new Barge formula of Tandy's contact cement, which may have worked better, though it smelled even worse than the previous cement).

The Lure of Leather

This is the piece of thick "saddle skirting" leather I used for my soles. It was an entire side before I started cutting it, and it takes up most of my kitchen floor.


Once in a while I get way too much help! Both my younger daughter and Lacey think this is just the place to plop down for a bit...


And, of course, they want some sandals too!

Shoe Mania, Part 2: Strappy Uppers

In my previous sandal-making post, I cut and formed the soles and heels of my new sandals. During the time I was waiting for those to dry, I started working on the uppers of the sandals. I started by preparing the straps.

The buckles I was using required a size #6 hole for the buckle tongues. I thought I'd try to save some time later by preparing the strap ends with holes and points ahead of time, as shown in the picture. It turned out that it made the fitting a little bit harder, so I won't do it that way again. It's easier to make the holes and such later than it is to correctly position the buckle later.

I used a half-inch oblong punch (also known as a bag punch or oval punch) to make the holes for my straps. I had put my foot on the upper sole to mark the hole locations. I find the punches to be kind of slippery and hard to hold, so I put the rubber bands on to improve the grip. It didn't help much, unfortunately.

Here I tried putting the straps in place, and the whole thing is held together with more rubber bands (if I had to be stranded on a desert island, I'd want a big bag of rubber bands with me).

Here is how the straps look from under the upper sole. You can imagine that these fairly thick straps might be a bit uncomfortable to walk on, since you would feel them as lumps through the upper sole.

One way to deal with the lumpy strap problem is suggested in the Sandal Making book: use a scarier-looking version of a man's razor, called a skiver (in this case a "Super Skiver"), to carefully scrape off enough thickness from the upper sole so that the straps nestle into the sole. Depending on the thicknesses of the straps and the sole, this approach varies in its success.

One thing I found is that the skiver takes a lot of practice to use, and it's a bit like using a potato peeler. The amount of material you take off in one swipe depends on the angle of the handle relative to the leather surface. It's really easy to dig right into your leather and cut off more than you intended. On the other hand, if you stay timid, you'll take a lot of time and not get deep enough. Practice, practice, practice.

Another approach, which I didn't do on this pair of sandals (guess what's coming in a future blog), is to skive the upper sole, the lower sole, and the straps. That doesn't work for all cases, though, such as where the straps are adjustable and you may later expose a part of the strap that was initially covered.

Dyeing

The next step is to dye the various pieces before assembly. Similar to how I finished my third belt, I dyed them all with Tandy's Leather Dye, cleaned them with Lexol, and finished them with a layer of Tandy's Carnauba Creme. I dyed the entire length of each strap (both sides) since the adjustable straps will be able to slide through the shoe--I don't know for certain what parts will show, and it may change over time.


Here is how buffing affects the look of the Carnauba Creme. The lower piece in the picture has been buffed with a cloth and is nice and shiny. There are some white flecks of wax on the upper piece.


I couldn't resist putting the shoes back together with the rubber bands to see how they looked at this point:


Hardware

Adding the hardware, the buckles and rivets, was one of the more satisfying stages for me. This is when things started to look really cool and shiny.

Since I hadn't done buckles before, I had to play with getting the size and location of the slot correct on the strap. I tried my half-inch and three-quarter-inch punches, as well as punching two small holes and using a knife to cut out the leather between them (second hole from the right).


The three-quarter-inch punch worked the best for my half-inch sandal buckles.


Here you can see the slot for the buckle and the corresponding holes for the rivet that holds the buckle onto the strap:


Here are the uppers with buckles and rivets, all ready for the final assembly to the lower soles.


To be continued....

Remodel, Reuse, Recycle

Just a quick "reuse, recycle" note.

When I was doing the remodeling project at my rental house, I hated to throw away anything that might be usable again later. Yep, "Packrat" is my middle name.

One thing that got kept was a hollow door that was no longer needed. It got replaced by a wall. Not in perfect condition, and has a small chunk cut out of one side of it (it was a pocket door), but it is pretty clean and flat.

As I mentioned before, I have been working to make my craft room more usable for the many projects I always have going. The door is just small enough to fit in the room, so I got a couple of Vika Artur trestles from IKEA. I had a couple strips of leftover foam flooring, which I put on top of the trestles to help absorb vibration (I hope).


Well, flat surface in my house never stays bare for long, and this didn't even stay bare long enough for me to get a picture! But the door is under there, valiantly serving as a workbench table top, covered partly by a reused drycleaners' bag to protect it from the contact cement I'm using on my sandals.

And since I'm now buying contact cement by the gallon, I'm storing smaller quantities of it in a jar that once held Procion dye powder from Dharma (the black jar in the middle of the following picture). Gotta use them for something!


Another Recycling Note

I have been working on my jeans circle quilt a little bit at a time. At this point it is in three big pieces (safety-pinned together in these pictures), and I have sewn down most of the tie-dyed squares and batting. I have about 21 squares to go (out of 221) before I can sew the three pieces together, but now I need to stop and figure out which square fits where, since several have fallen out somewhere along the way. Good thing I have a few extras.

This is the first time I've laid the whole thing out since I started sewing down the squares, and it's huge! That's my whole seats-eight-comfortably dining room table underneath the quilt, with the two table leaves pulled a bit apart for extra length and the chair backs supporting the extra width. It didn't look quite so big upstairs on the floor of the kids' playroom.


I imagine it would go more quickly if I didn't have to clear everything off the dining room table to work on it.

Someday I'll finish this...